The Food Monster (3E)

Hamburgers are my favourite food. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered my insatiable constant craving of hamburgers, and that’s because I would simply refuse to eat them.  Not because they didn’t taste good, and not because they didn’t make my mouth water, but because whenever I ordered a hamburger at McDonald’s, it came with a side of hassle and with a regular sized drink of awkward.

The recipe for the perfect burger:

Perfect!

• Bun
• Burger
• Cheese, sometimes
• Bacon, always
• NO lettuce
• NO tomatoes
• NO onions
• NO pickles
• NO ketchup, NO mustard, NO relish, NO mayonnaise

I haven’t had a trip to McDonald’s yet where the worker hasn’t squinted at me with wariness after I ask them to make my sandwich plain.  And the times that my patty actually makes it to my hands plain?  Few.  More often than not I need to be that jerk who sends a perfectly fine hamburger back because it has lettuce on it.  I’ve tried eating it after removing all of the toppings to avoid being that jerk, but the mayonnaise has seeped into the bun.  It’s a lost cause.  There’s nothing I can do to save you, hamburger.

If you think my peril at McDonald’s is bad, think about Subway.

I love me some subs, but I was scared of going to Subway for the longest time because of my bare-boned choice of toppings.

The Matt Sub:

• Bread
• Cheese
• Chicken
• Bacon
• Hot sauce

There you have it.  A waste of money if I’ve ever seen one, to put meat and cheese on a foot-long bun.

I am a very picky eater.

WHAT IS THIS MESS?

I don’t like condiments.  I don’t like fruit.  I don’t like vegetables.  I don’t like overly complicated foods with multiple ingredients.

My pickiness comes from my fear of trying new things. It’s a wonder I like broccoli.  I was literally forced to try it.  Otherwise, I don’t venture much when it comes to food, mainly because I’m a very close-minded individual.

But I think my biggest problem is my inability to have foods touch. Thanksgiving is an ordeal for me, because I have to set up walls between my different foods so that my grandmother doesn’t drop a heap of mashed potatoes over my mound of rice – oh god, that thought makes me queasy.  And the gravy.  It seeps everywhere.  The thought of combining flavour, why, that’s positively alien
to me.  To me, food is meant to be enjoyed separately, and my rationale is that I like to enjoy each component’s flavour as they are.

It’s a wonder I can manage to eat a stir fry, but it’s a struggle.

Foods I Like:

I like my basics.

• I like a good breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast.
• I love all carbohydrates, the plain janes of the food pyramid: bread, crackers, rice, pasta (but never with tomato sauce because I don’t like tomatoes and I don’t like sauce.  I’m a bad Italian)
• I like all kinds of meat and fish.
• I like all junk food.
• I like potatoes, thank goodness, because they’re a staple to my meals whether mashed or baked or as greasy greasy French fries.

Foods I Don’t Like:

• EVERYTHING ELSE.

In the meantime I’ll stick to my Angus Third Pounders with just bacon and cheese, or my Oven Roasted Chicken foot-longs with bacon and hot sauce.

Plain, just the way I like it.

The Notebook (2E)

I mourn for these notes, needlessly defiled.

Twentieth Century American Literature is not an interesting enough class to pay attention to for two hours.  To stop myself from falling asleep my friend and I resort to good old fashioned note-passing.  She writes something in her margin, points, and laughs, and I laugh too, but I don’t write a response in my own margins.  Because I can’t.  Sometimes they might lean over to my page, and I tear my notebook away from the tip of their pen and snap at them.  The margins need to be left completely blank, or else the whole note is ruined.

It’s times like these where I think I have OCD.

The first notes of the year make me nervous.

It’s the first day of class.  You’re excited to start the new semester off on a good note (pun intended?).  You sit down in class.  You’re nervous, but what about?  Worried that you might not like the course, the professor, or the selected readings or marks breakdown?  Do you shift around uncomfortably because you don’t know anybody else in this class, and you’re too shy to strike up conversation with somebody new?  Or all of the above?  That’s the case for me, but these things barely matter: my biggest concern is with how I’m going to write my first class notes.

You might think that this isinsignificant, but it’s a big deal for me.  However I decide to write my notes in this first class is the benchmark for my note taking for the rest of the semester.  I can’t mess it up.  The thought of having a notebook full of mismatched notes is preposterous.  Everything needs to be neat, identical, and uniform.  It’s a weird habit, but it’s in line with my usual organizational compulsions.  If you were to come into my bedroom, it would be like stepping into an alphabetized and categorized heaven.

I treasure perfection.  The decisions I make on that first day ensure that the rest of the year will follow suit with cleanliness and crisp looking notes.  I’m often complimented on my penmanship and I’ve had many people tell me my notes look like they’ve been typed, and that nearly brings a tear to my eye.  Success!

What, then, is my formula?

The Notes:

• The title.  Should I write it all in capitals?  Should it be centered, or justified to the left?  What do I write as the title – the lecture number, or the title of the reading for the day, or both?  Do I write it on the very top line of the page, or on the second?

• The date.  Numbers and slashes, or words?  If words, do I write the day of the week, too, and if I do, do I write it in full or in short form?  And the month – long or short version?  Top left of the page, or top right?  If the title’s on the top line, the date has to share its space; if the title’s on the second line, the date gets the top line to itself.

• The bullets.  I always use point form, mostly; bullets, dashes, or dots?

• The keywords.  In red, obviously, to stand out, but in capital letters?  When I come to a second line for any given keyword definition, do I start writing at the margin or do I line up the start of the sentence with the end of the keyword above?

• The red pen.  When and where?

The Red Pen:

Oh, my red pen.

Ever since the seventh grade when my teacher made everyone use a red pen to underline the title and the date, I haven’t been able to part with red pens.  I’ve since abandoned that practice – I find underlining things to be messy because I can never muster a perfectly straight line.  Sometimes I write the title in red, or the date, and most times I write the course code in the top left corner in capital letters.

As good as the red pen is, it’s not a big enough superstar to scribe a note itself.  Always black.  Never blue.

The Margins:

NEVER TOUCH THE MARGINS.

The Finished Product:

Drumroll…

Perfection!

To my friends, my note taking habits are a bit of a mockery.  What usually follows my snapping at them is a quick strike and before I know it they’re smirking at the small black dashes they manage to get on my pages.  Little do they know, it isn’t really a victory.  I get to go home and recopy the notes and make them look even better.

So, ha.

Bump in the Night (1F)

Are You Afraid of the Dark? asked that TV show I watched after Goosebumps as a kid on YTV.  Well, the answer was yes, I was scared of the dark, thank you very much.  Today, that answer remains the same.

I hate staying up late.

I can’t believe this was a show for children.

I never stayed up late into the night until recently.  When I lived at home, I went to bed at ten because that’s when my parents went to bed.  The thought of being the only one awake in the whole house terrified me.  The distance between the TV room to my bed was too great, and if a murderer or the girl from The Ring decided to jump out from the dark, I’d be dead on the floor from panic before they would even get me with their knives or grimy little girl zombie fingers.

University gave me the opportunity to be the unproductive person up until two in the morning that I am today.  Why?  Because I can get from the light switch in my room to my bed with one giant Superman leap in the dark.

The dark makes uncomfortable.  It’s the breeding grounds for murderers and demons and spirits and every scary little girl from every scary movie on the face of the earth.  Turn the corner and boo, it’s the Ring girl and the Grudge lady and inthenameofthefatherthesonandtheholyspirit the girl from The Exorcist who – and I have never even seen The Exorcist – is so scary to me that I physically can’t look at a picture of her; she’s been the source of chronic nightmares since I was eight.  I know my fear of the dark is irrational, but once the lights are flicked off the scariest things my mind can conjure become manifestations in the shadows.

Mind you, I’m a very jumpy person.  I’m afraid of a lot of things.

Matt is afraid of:

• Snakes
• Clowns
• Murderers
• Loud noises
• Scar from The Lion King
• My basement
• Exorcisms
• Possessions
• American Horror Story
• Hauntings
• Poltergeists
• Nerdy girls who are the laughing stock of their high schools and are then humiliated at their high school proms by the popular kids who dump blood on her until she snaps and kills everyone with her telekinesis

Deep down, though, there’s a part of me that likes to be scared.  I willingly pay money to see horror movies in theaters because I like thrill.

I’m terrified of the unknown.

This is generally my reaction to horror movies, only I’m usually delirious from weeping.

What scares me most: the fear of the unknown, and of possibility.  The Blair Witch Project was downright terrifying to me because you never once see what’s chasing them for the entire movie, and you’re left to decide for yourself what it was that makes them scream in terror and eventually die.  What did I think it was?  The girl from The Exorcist, so you can only imagine that that made my viewing experience much worse.

The dark robs me of my most fundamental sense: sight.  And with my sight goes my security.  And with my lack of security comes my overactive imagination.  And in the dark, I rue my overactive imagination.  Creak!  Was it just the old house shifting, or is Jason Voorhees here for my head?  Scratch!  Branches at the window, or Freddy Krueger, so wake up wake up wake up!

To compensate for my lack of security, I take ridiculous measures.  For instance, at this very moment, I have the dead bolt on the door, the blinds drawn on the windows, the lights off but my lamp on, and I’m tucked under my covers clutching my teddy bear.  But open the bedroom door, flick off the lamp, or pull the covers down from over my head – darkness.  It’s inescapable.

What scares you?